Ultima Labs launches MSP automated cloud proposition

Ultima Labs, the product development arm of channel player Ultima, is giving managed service providers (MSPs) the opportunity to purchase its automated cloud platform.

The IA-Cloud offering is designed to help MSPs manage and optimse customer workloads and should result in reduced Azure management costs and happier customers. The pressure to help customers on the cloud has become even more important during the coronavirus pandemic, which has seen a surge in the volume of workers trying to connect remotely to hosted platforms.

The senior management team at Ultima have been big believers in the power of automation and have been increasing skills and expertise in that area over the past few years.

Ultima Labs was launched in February with a remit to develop tools to help customers. It started off with its IA-Connect offering, which covered many security issues for users who do not want to automate over a virtual private network (VPN).

The Ultima Labs operation has now reached a stage where it has a proposition that can be shared with the wider MSP community.

“While developing our own automated platforms for our customers, we were asked by our partners and Microsoft to build them for other MSPs, so that’s what we’ve done. With remote working continuing apace, MSPs are under pressure to manage new workloads and optimise workloads via the cloud at an unprecedented rate,” said Scott Dodds, CEO of Ultima.

“IA-Cloud is designed to build, monitor, manage and optimise Azure environments for MSPs, with enterprise-level architecture so that they can focus more on customer service and innovation. It allows MSPs to deliver new services and automate existing ones, thereby adding value to existing customers and growing their customer base,” added Dodds. 

Amyn Jaffer, head of Ultima Labs, said that using automation gave a chance for MSPs to add more value for customers, and took pressure off what were already tight margins by allowing technology to do some of the heavy lifting.

The automation allows issues to be reported in real-time through a dashboard that should save MSPs time and increase the value they can offer customers.

“We’ve created technology that allows our cost and recommendation engine to reduce costs to serve without affecting service levels,” said Jaffer.

“Our automated monitoring allows customers to track performance levels and issues in real-time via a single portal. Zero-touch infrastructure documentation is also included which saves engineers around 150 hours a year – time well spent on improving customer engagement instead.”

He added that there was a recognition that the platform had to be straightforward for MSPs to set up themselves, and said the system could be set up in a matter of minutes.